Star Crossed
by xheartmehorrid
Summary: [kxl] We're starcrossed and cannot escape. [The love Legato had for Knives was dangerous, like balancing on the end of a razor blade, precariously waiting to fall from the edge at last.]


disclaimer: characters and TRIGUN don't belong to me. obviously.

**( Star-Crossed )  
**

_"We're star-crossed and cannot escape." _

He'd been in his Master's dreams.

His Master's dreams were nightmares.

They were wretched; a contortionist's act of cruelty and fantasy; a splattering of blood- metaphorical and also very real- and flashes of a distant childhood on a project ship, floating in outer space, huddled in the crooks of his brother's body. Knives's bones rattled as he slept, and he coughed jarringly. The memories of his past were a physical pain. And as they say, abused children often become abusers themselves. So it was that the fists of a burlesque, drunken man rained down on Knives's skull, his eyes small, wet, palpable as he yielded, his shadow crouching in the curve of this man's palm, and so it was that the man, Steve, curled up inside the frozen chamber, screaming indignance, and breathed his final breath as a young Knives looked on gloatingly. And when Vash threw himself against the escape pod doors, the wetness gathering around his eyes clumping his lashes and lighting their tips with the colors of endless stars and the destruction; the way he thought of _her _with no end to it; and the way Knives beat him for that; that was abuse.

And it was abuse when Knives lay wailing in the dunes until his skin baked to the color of cracked dirt and his throat ran raw, blood pooling around him from his leg into one great mass of heat and liquid, as he watched his brother's back retreating away from him forever into the vastness of that endless hideous world. He was alone, then. Abandoned.

He would never let that go.

But it was not abuse when Knives caressed him with the blades that sprung from vertebrae that sprung from flesh like the flowers that never were. And Knives's lips were very much a flower, swelling against the buried hollows of his throat. His pulse raced; quick blackness slashed across his eyes. Every delicious bite of blade, the red bed of spring and skeleton screaming- the nails that burrowed in his hips and left small crescent scars. His whole mouth was a long sigh of pleasure escaping. Deeply delicate carving strokes like a sculpture. It was not abuse when as a child he kneeled, naked, at His mercy, and recieved it.

But the Master's love was a fickle thing, dangerous as walking the edge of a razor blade; precariously waiting to be sent over the edge at last. Cut and shorn to pieces if he fell. His life's work. His obsession. He remembers pressing his fingertips to the warmth of the mother bulb as Knives swirled inside, blind, mute, and badly burned. The light that radiated from that, like a belly full of swallowed stars. His wrists pulsing with that light. And his Master's voice, strange and mellifluous, numbing the constant erratic whispers of his skull, lulling him to obedience over, and over, and over again; even in the catatonic state that He was in.

And Legato had been young then. Young enough to hack off his arm and fixate it with a plant-god's disembodied limb, like bleeding the blood of an Adonis into his. Besides the rush of power, the clarity, and the accomplishment he'd felt at being able to complete this great task for his Master's sake, all he had felt was shame. Unnerving how deep it ran.

But here they were now.

Knives was tangled in his sheets, draped in ghosts, his eyes a boiling distant azure. He wore gauze like a starry veil. A clear, thin sheen of cold sweat had gathered on his porcelain skin, pearling on the sweet arch of his spine, his hair, his lashes. His fingers clenched and unclenched periodically. He would not look away from the window.

"Legato," he beckoned, cold and pointed, somehow cracked at the lungs. A shattered teacup shard. "Come."

It was all he needed.

He bent himself, lithe as the cat his eyes resembled, against the flower-scented whole of his Master's body, ever the servant, yielding to his every whim. He was starved for Him, unworthy of Him. This was a place for the starved and thirsting beasts who hid. And he was starved for this flesh; shining perfection; parched for this love; the unattainable, incestuous obsession which ruled the every nerve and cell and emotion and reaction which made his Master what and who he was, and he hid, but he could never hide from Him. And so he sighed, raking his nails along the slender sleek of bone under the skin, closing his eyes so that delicate shadows fell across his cheekbones. His Master held him there; so hard and tight it hurt.

But so _real. _Like a touch. Like a breath.

And then the pain.

The face of divinity twisted, contorted with rage, unabridged, unceasing- the shocking startled white of knuckles crushing the bones of his teeth, nose, throat, chest, his chest bones like instruments, were teeth bones? And his lips puffing the dark blued color of a bruise, swelling with violent kisses. But this was his monster. This was his vice. Not what he had created, but very much what had created him. And it was no one's fault but Vash's. And this was no one's fault but his. Twisting, he cried out, splattering black against the sheets and into his hands; his skin the eerie feverish white sheen of calla lillies. Knives punched him in the jaw so hard he thought that it would break.

Beauty and the Beast. Maybe I am a little of both. But I don't know which is outside and which one is in. But how could I be Beauty? So impure. No, I could never love a Beast. _Something so beautiful but hideous inside. _

Knives smiled, hauntingly.

"Give me your hand."

He did. Knives slapped it away.

"Your other hand!"

He extended Vash's hand in its place, and shuddered with a familiar, compulsive self-loathing.

The Master peeled each finger back like the soft petals off a rose, planting damp kisses on the fingertips, the knuckles, and the circle of the middle of his palm. "My brother," he cooed, deliciously. Still it ached with love and menace. Always mixing cruelty with love. "Why must I hurt you to save you? If only you'd come back to me on your own."

And at the same time, his eyes, deep sunken pools of blue gardens, glowed swirly, pale marbles in his head, fixing the golden gaze of his lover-slave, the scar that bonded him to the one that he loved. Substitute only. Not worthy of love. Undeserving even to be spit on. Undeserving of existence.

Of existing here, with Him.

Knives crawled in, buried alive between the sleek curves of Legato's thighs, licking in elongated swipes like salt from the rim of a martini glass. Legato threw back his head, throat arched like a feline, like a god. But he was no god. Nothing compared to this.

Later, bathed with the light of all the desert stars, the enroaching blackness, coiled in the bed like one flesh knot, a single body, their breaths melted steadily together; snaking out behind their multiple sets of ribs. Legato buried his fingers into the bones in Knives's sides, a shadow between every one of his ribs like the rungs on a ladder, descending into darkness. Wanton, shamless. Hopeless as the stars faded and burned unceasingly. Legato crushed his Master's body to his chest, thoughtless of the consequences. Knives's dreams were so tight; even when his most devoted crept into his mind to soothe them, the rampant, hellish visions that tormented his Master nightly, the sleeping plant never awoke.

Little did he know, clutching his Master close to him in that bed, how he'd soon be buried in that blowing sea of sand outside beyond them, wreathed in the smell of fading gun smoke, his lips dotted with red, in death. His last words.

"_What am I worth?_"

After everything. And the mechanical ringing of laughter that would tear through him like a knife, killing him faster than the bullet, having killed him long before that, mocking the very essence of his life as he lay on the ground absently drifting and watching the last drops of it seep out of him at last. That laughter would be the death of him.

And never hearing Knives's last words, cool and calm as porcelain:

Answering simply, "_Nothing_."

But that if there would have been a funeral that day, Knives would have gone. The guilty. The lamb-slayer. Knives alone would have gone.

He knew he'd had to finish what he'd, what _they'd_, started; the accidental attraction that his blood itself could not deny. One that he could not let himself continue.

And he had finished it the only way he knew how.

In a cutting maneuver; one that would only bring him closer to Vash.

And, in Eden, clutching his brother to himself, feeling the same inside, bathed in the silk of plants and skies and flowers and _life_, none of this wretched sand, this world of dust; so _human_; would he press his lips and nose and eyes into the petals of the newborn roses and somehow find them dead and ruinous? All because he had died for this, and yet, he had meant nothing. All of them pawns. And still, he'd let this one get close to him. Too close, perhaps.

The dome of heaven, ink black, glittered with stars like a prostitute's fake jewelery, bathing the Master's sleeping, huddled form in an almost unholy glow. Unearthly, certainly. But then again, they weren't on Earth. Where it snowed, where true leaves bloomed. And where it rained, washing their sins into the sea over and over and over again. If only there was water great and deep enough to wash this sin away.

And yet, he couldn't help but think, nursing his blackening bruises, feeling the soft breaths flutter in his Master's chest, cradled against him, he could not breathe, could not move, could not think, or even speak. Struck blind and impotent. The beauty was too much. The life, the death; all of it too much to bear. Could not help but to wonder. What did it all mean?

And so he only drifted off, dreamless, twining his fingers in the Master's hair. For once, safe.

_Knowing no difference between heaven and hell. _


End file.
